


The One with Canadian Geese at the End

by 2bee



Category: Friends (TV)
Genre: ?????????? IDFK!!!!!!! MAN!!!!!!!!!! IT JUST HAPPENED!!!!!!!!, F/F, Love Confessions, M/M, Mutual Pining, Post-Finale, THEY ARE GAY!!!!!!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-08
Updated: 2016-10-08
Packaged: 2018-08-20 04:53:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8236735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2bee/pseuds/2bee
Summary: Almost forty years and you start to get sick of yourself, and it doesn’t wash right off like it used to.





	1. Chapter 1

_ONE_

Somebody was supposed to come and slap him before any of it went too far. That was how stupid he was—since he was fifteen he’d had this conviction that there was somebody or something looking out for him that would grab him by the scruff of the neck before anybody got hurt. Before he started wasting years of his life. It wasn’t supposed to be his responsibility. Anything so he wouldn’t have to do it. A cosmic shove.

But he got carried away. Seduced by it. Convinced, even, that he’d be able to do it. That it’d be easy. Fine.

He supposed that this was just what it was supposed to be like, getting older: apathy and decay, trips to the supermarket. He liked to sit in traffic on the way home and imagine meteors falling from the sky, obliterating people from existence to the sound of the Top 40. Anything was better than nothing. Chandler found that just imagining the sound of the crash, the impact, the crush of metal, to be incredibly cathartic. This idea of marriage—that from the outside seemed sacred, untouched—tarnished and suffocated and pushed with both hands against the inside of his chest. Every year the sense of muffled silence, of being surrounded by dirt, grew worse. Heavier. No wonder Ross had such a passion for proposals: the promise of that moment. It was delirious. It was that perfect, imagined future, crystalized, distilled. _We can._ You believe anything in that moment. You believe that you’re going to be happy.

The problem was that he’d never really properly got over the fact that he’d been fucked up by his parents’ divorce. It was just that the whole notion of “daddy issues” was so repulsive, especially now that thinking back to childhood felt like glimpsing back through a very long, thin cardboard tube. He’d hated his father for what he had done, as much as a nine year old could hate a person. _You broke something perfect,_ that was the feeling. _We were perfect. We were what everybody was supposed to be. We were how you love people._ Yes, that was the real problem. He was forced to learn his parents were people long before the children of stable households did. And for that reason he’d never really realized that marriage isn’t the castle you think that it is at six. Always just people. Always hiding this from children.

Even now, daydreaming of catastrophic hailstones and showering in ice cold water and buying books he never even opens, Chandler can’t stand the idea of being anything like his father. He can feel what it must have felt like and it makes him want to vomit, to empathize, to have become this person. To have always been, everything that he’s lied so well about his whole life just—

Honestly, it’s the thought of having been incorrect for so long. Of having his own children look at him that way. Or, worse, for understanding, for treating him kindly, shaming him all the more with their acceptance.

But it’s the weight of the dirt on his chest. The stillness of their dust-covered bookshelves, of the perfect and hateful dinner parties with their uptight neighbors and the ‘nice’ dinnerware with the little _bird_ pattern on it. The Quinns and the fucking McKinnons. Chandler entertained himself whenever Pat McKinnon spoke by counting how many words he’d get out before needing to shove more food into his mouth. Rachel, who had once also had the privilege of dining with the McKinnons, found this count to be hysterical, which meant that Chandler would often text her live updates from under the table.

Rachel once had a dream that he and Joey had sex. Back before they’d first kissed, even. Chandler still wonders if she’d been making the whole thing up—she had spent the first few months of their friendship trying to suss out if he was gay or not, Chandler was absolutely certain—but at the time, he hadn’t had the guts to ask her. He couldn’t figure out how to bring it up without betraying that he couldn’t stop thinking about it, and his continued interest would reveal to Rachel he was gay even if she _hadn’t_ been trying to figure it out.

That would all be for naught, of course. Rachel was the only one that knew.

“You’re not honest enough with yourself, Chandler,” she’d said, running her hand through his hair. “I like this you.”

He’d never had a woman tell him something like that before, so simply. He wonders if he’d have been better at loving Rachel. But that never would have even become an issue—she’d have known, right away, even if he hadn’t told her. And now he’s making it sound like Monica’s fault.

He’d made it two months, which is what really haunts him. Eight years and he’d only made it two months and he can remember it better than the day he met his daughters. And he can’t even talk to a therapist, because can you imagine the look on a therapist’s face if he told them _that?_

Monica hadn’t allowed him to have a bachelor party, a slight that Joey had taken as a personal offense, only to reveal later that Rachel and Phoebe had thrown her a bash of their own before the wedding. And he hadn’t wanted to, but Monica had insisted, and somehow his Saturday became he and Joey alone in his apartment, waiting for a stripper. And in his mind, where he doesn’t have to deal with the consequences of such an accusation, he pretends Joey planted the seed of all of it at the beginning of the evening. He’d asked him what it felt like to know that he’d be “waking up and seeing the same face over and over and over again for the rest of his life until he felt the sweet release of death.” Every day. That was the moment. Marriage was big and beautiful and what you were supposed to do. It wasn’t... tying shoes.

But it was. And the way he’d said it—like he _knew_ , like he was shaming him for it. _You committed. You did it. You can’t turn back now._

The stripper had turned out to be a prostitute and of course, of _course_ it would be over _this_ that Joey got nostalgic. We don’t hang out anymore, he’d said. We used to be inseparable. _I used to touch you,_ Chandler had thought back. Not just the sex—hands on his shoulders, sitting next to each other. _I used to complain about your morning breath._

He should have just—he doesn’t even know what he should have just. He’d told him they’d start setting aside time to hang out with one another. He should have just done that. He should have slept with Monica and gone out with Joey to public places and otherwise continue avoiding him until he’d escaped to the suburbs. Stop the feelings from starting. Be with Joey the way he was with Ross.

Then, that night, 1am—Joey’s door was open. Rachel had been living with him again, he remembers. He hadn’t been thinking about that at all, at the time.

The worst thing about Joey’s apartment, then and now, is that it smells exactly like him. Still smells exactly like him. Joey is so resistant to change and so set in his habits from food to TV to toothpaste, and Chandler had lived with him for so many years... Chandler could pick up a t-shirt Joey had worn and it would send him right back to his twenties. Stepping into his apartment, it was—it was—

You forget that the world ends. You forget that this is the only chance you have to be young.

He tells himself even now that he doesn’t know what he was trying to achieve by going over that night. He didn’t even know if he’d be awake. But Joey had been standing in the kitchen in the dark, eating macaroni and cheese out of the pot. The only light came from the hall through the doorway and the television. There’d been some weird sort of infomercial playing with the volume very low, something about a putty so sticky you could tow things behind your car with it.

The look on Joey’s face—so open and curious. He’d swiveled to put the pot down behind him on the counter, finishing his last bite of mac and cheese as he did so. “What are you doing here?”

_He doesn’t know,_ he’d thought. And he’d stepped forward, placing his hands on either side of Joey’s face—

“How could _we_ not know?” Rachel had said in disbelief. “How can we not have talked about this? We talked about _everything.”_

“Yeah, well. Not this. And you’re going to keep it that way.”

– god, he’d tasted—well. Like mouth, for the most part, and beer and mac and cheese. But Joey was the best kisser in the world, and he knew all the places you were supposed to touch a person, and he nibbled on Chandler’s lower lip in a way that made him forget where he was and it was so much more than he’d ever felt while kissing a woman, like filling a hole with hot sand on the most beautiful day in the world, and Joey’s hands had gone around Chandler’s waist and he’d said “don’t make me do this” into Chandler’s ear and he’d been hard already and holding onto Joey’s t-shirt like letting go would kill him and just the sound of their breathing turned him on and made him want to cry out in pain and he’d said “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry,” and he’d run his hands into Joey’s hair.

Sometimes, after the sun has set, he’ll go upstairs and open the window on his side of the bed and stick out as much of his body as he can without it being dangerous. He imagines a roar. Less meteors—more ocean. If he closes his eyes in a light breeze, he can almost feel it. He can see it, definitely: the tide coming in. Silver fish (are tuna silver?) by the thousands flopping around on the beach trying to return to the water. Seals lounging on rocks, grunting. It takes all his focus to bring the ocean up into their backyard. To collect the fish again. To beat it against the baseboards of their little house. To crash through the first floor, rip out the innards and carry away the sofa and the television and all the pots and pans in their stupid little expensive kitchen. To climb the stairs. To carry him away to the city.

*

Here are the things Monica knows about her husband:

  * He hides his Lucky Strikes in a box in the attic, under three blankets his grandmother knit, and he blows the smoke through a paper towel tube with a dryer sheet on the end to try and mask the smell.
  * He prefers one of their daughters over the other but he won’t say which and Monica’s certain it’s Jamie.
  * He talks in his sleep.



Chandler used to have funny dreams. He used to sit in Central Perk and talk about them and Monica had listened to them before she’d ever felt any romantic feelings for him at all. That’s funny to think about—but then again, she doesn’t actually know what romantic feelings for Chandler might feel like. Even in those first weeks, when everything is new and fluttering and you can’t stop smiling while you’re making coffee and talking to your mother and riding to work on the subway, it had felt more like a weird joke than giddiness. It was _Chandler._ Chandler, who had dreams that he was Liza Minelli or that he was naked in school with a ringing phone where his penis was supposed to be.

_That_ makes her giddy—the memory of Chandler Before Everything. She thinks about that era a lot—Everybody Before Everything. She tries to put it together all the time. Maybe she feels she missed the floundering, maybe she misses being young, maybe she just misses Rachel, and how she saw her every day. But there’s something else about it—like she regrets not realizing it would end before it was over. Somewhere along the way they took a wrong turn and they didn’t know there was no going back. Things got dirty. They paired off; couples became units and they moved far away from each other. Sometimes Monica got annoyed at her very existence. Almost forty years and you start to get sick of yourself, and it doesn’t wash right off like it used to.

Chandler talks in his sleep.

It’s never coherent—he’ll shout about Jersey, or sheep, or dogs, or tofu—but it’s—Sometimes it’s enough to keep her awake, wondering.

It wouldn’t be something that she thought about if it weren’t for the fact that he lies when she asks about them. He slept well, he says. I dream about whales, a lot. And oceans.

Monica dreams about labyrinths and cars and first grade teachers that don’t have any hearts and cutting the crusts off of grilled cheese sandwiches. Backyard cookouts gone wrong and mothers in pearls laughing at her lobster bisque. She’ll have dreams where she’s fat again. Sometimes she dreams she’s cooking for her mother but she keeps getting all the ingredients wrong and has to start over. But then she’d realize that it wasn’t her, but the ingredients themselves—egg yolks that turned out to be black once cracked, tomatoes that seemed to bleed when she cut them, bread that turned to sand between her fingers. When she wakes up, she has to remind herself that her mother has died.

She doesn’t know why he bothers to hide the smoking habit. Anymore, at the very least. She got it more around years two, three, but as time wears on it feels less and less necessary. There are some lessons you learn through marriage that you can’t learn elsewhere. Like, you can’t change people. And people can’t change themselves. You just try not to think about it—the smoking, the dreams.

Jamie’s in a funny stage where she doesn’t want to like her. She dreams about that too, sometimes, dreaming herself into the rooms of the girls’ dollhouse. Tiny and breakable and ignored in favor of a stuffed poodle. Monica doesn’t know why she gets herself so worked up about it. It’s just like how she gets too offended when the kids don’t like her cooking. And Madison still likes her just fine.

Chandler likes pretending their life is different, that’s the thing. Monica liked pretending too, but it’s been happening less and less nowadays. She figures that they both are getting tired. She is still very frustrated by how he doesn’t put in any effort with the neighbors, but these were the sorts of things TV always warned her would happen. That’s one of her only comforts, if it could be called a comfort—at least she was normal.

She wants Jamie to be somebody else too much. She gets too angry with her when she goes out into the woods and ruins her clothes. She’s like that with too many people. She’s always been like that.

Chandler hasn’t told her anything substantial about himself in years. The last time—they had gone to Hawaii for their fifth anniversary. Chandler had spent the whole day playing her substantially less coordinated shadow while sightseeing, and in the evening, hadn’t been able to get it up. “I’m so lucky I have you,” he’d said. The sun had been setting and the light through the curtains had turned the whole room a bright red, and Chandler wouldn’t look at her. “I didn’t think I’d ever find somebody who could—stand me.”

“Who could _stand_ you?”

“Yeah—I mean, I can’t even stand myself sometimes.”

And she thought, _We have more in common than I realized._

*

It’s odd to feel old in what once felt like a young city. Because it’s not just that New York has aged _with_ him, that everywhere he goes he can say I got drunk here, I threw up there, three streets over was where I illegally parked my car and had it towed while I was having sex with those triplets (and it was worth it). New York had been old forever, and he’d just never seen it. Younger people take hold of the world and only when it isn’t yours anymore do you start to get the picture of how yours it isn’t. Or however you say it. He’s not a historian or anything—if pressed, he’s not actually sure he could spell ‘historian.’ Like, spelling bee style. If he had a while to work it out—but the real thing, the thing that matters, is stuff like there were whole communities of people that lived on these roads and they’re dead now. And there might have been somebody who played saxophone on this corner or a shoe shine boy that went to California or maybe this is where some Revolutionary war officer stood before a battle, or maybe all three at once. And these came with the company of just really weird thoughts, like, I think I’ve seen that pigeon before, and, you know, I think that that might be my gum.

He feels more alone than he ever has, but he’s found that he doesn’t mind as much as he once thought he would. He has Cannoli, and she’s company enough. It’s funny: Joey first bought the dog because he thought that it’d be a chick magnet. Chandler had been visiting him in the city, and they went together, peering at all the dogs through the cages an keeping an unspoken but mandated distance between their bodies. Joey had wanted to adopt all of them—he’d been particularly interested in a white pit bull he was desperate to rename “Pork Chop”—but Chandler had found Cannoli. She was only a few months old, still puppylike, a golden retriever mixed with Irish setter. When Joey took her out he found himself not interested in trying to chat up women. Cannoli was enough.

He took her for a walk in Central Park every morning and every late afternoon. There were lots of things that he’d stopped telling Chandler. Even that day, when they’d gone to look at the dogs, though he’d been able to convince himself that he was in it for the phone numbers that would just “fall into your lap, Joe, I promise” (How would he know?), as he’d crouched to peer into the cage and scratch her ears the best he could through the chain link, he’d thought _I need you. I need you because I need a roommate but I can’t bear the thought of living with another person without feeling like I want to kill myself._

He was more lonely than the rest of his friends, he thought. But that’s just not something that you talk about.

Ross still thought he was a “ladykiller,” constantly overplaying his mock envy in hopes for stories that’d give him insight on a world he himself had never truly entered. With him in the suburbs, Joey think it’s easier to just let him believe whatever he wanted. The people that leave don’t have to realize that New York is old. They fit it into a snowglobe with the rest of their twenties. They peer in from time to time.

Phoebe still lived in the city, as much a burden as it was a comfort. He and Phoebe got along very well—better than they did with some of their other friends, even—but he felt the loss more when he was trying to fill the hole. And she had Mike, which was different.

He once bought just one volume of an encyclopedia with a fifty dollar bill he’d found in Chandler’s pants. V. He’d learned almost all of it. _Valor. Versailles. Vespucci. Vesuvius._ Sometimes he thinks about buying other letters. Chandler had got him J for his birthday once. _James Baldwin. Jaywalker. Jawline. Jazz._

Buying encyclopedias is stupid now, he remembers. You can just look it up online. But he doesn’t like doing that at all. He wouldn’t know where to start, first of all. Joey hated his generation. Too early to be raised with computers and know everything about them but too late to claim dumb and refuse to adapt. He decides he never cared about whether or not something was stupid, anyway. He’d buy himself another volume of the encyclopedia. He likes to have everything in one place. He likes being able to hold things in his hands. He hates concepts. People are always talking about things in terms of concepts, when they get old. They sail around the tough things and applaud themselves for being ‘intellectual.’ People always acted like they were smarter than he was when really they were just full of bullshit. Everyone was just full of bullshit. That was what he liked about dogs.

Chandler still doesn’t call their first kiss their first kiss. He just pretends it didn’t happen. Joey gets the _first_ first one—on New Year’s (the first time they’d ever spent the New Year together) their plans to be kissed at midnight had gone horribly awry, and Chandler had been begging for it. Jumping up and down begging for it! “Somebody kiss me, somebody kiss me!” Joey had kissed him to shut him up! So he gets it. Quick, perfunctory, with everybody watching—it could have been funny. But they pulled apart, and it hadn’t been. It wasn’t funny. It was right. And Joey _knows_ that Chandler knew it too.

When the party ended, all their dates sleeping with each other, he and Chandler had gone back across the hall. They’d helped Monica “clean,” so Chandler wore a baseball cap he’d found and Joey had draped streamers around his shoulders, a red one tied around his forehead. He’d felt excited, _awake._ It was _right,_ it was _now,_ it was _how have we not been doing this forever?_

“So,” he’d said, going straight to the fridge to get beers for himself and Chandler. “Happy new year.”

Chandler was antsy. Tetchy, even. He hadn’t been able to get his beer open. Joey reached out and took the baseball cap off for him. Joey still remembers—Chandler hadn’t stopped looking at the hat. “Joe.”

Joey had kissed him before he got another word out. This time he used his tongue, and he pushed Chandler around until he’d had him pressed up against their door. He shifted his knee between Chandler’s legs. And Chandler _moaned,_ piteous _._

Joey knew Chandler knew, which is what made the babe magnet story so annoying. He wishes they could have just said it to each other every once in a while. You’re buying a dog with me to give me somebody to spend time with. You’re taking care of second prize.

“Just thought I’d show you what a real Tribbiani kiss was like,” he’d said, giving him eyelash kisses along his cheekbones ending in chaste presses of his mouth against Chandler’s temples. His eyes were closed and he kept petting his left hand up and down along Joey’s side, inside his jacket, sometimes grasping at his hips before letting go again. A few of the streamers had fallen from Joey’s back and pooled around their feet, but Joey hadn’t noticed until the next morning, when he’d thrown them away. “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

And he hadn’t wanted to. So they didn’t, for a while.

Maybe he’ll buy L. _Late. Languish. Loser. Love._


	2. Chapter 2

_TWO_

So sue him. He isn’t an honest person and he’ll never quit smoking and he doesn’t go to AA, even though Monica thinks he does, and he smokes more than she thinks he does, and he doesn’t like anybody he talks to, and he likes Jamie better than Madison because Jamie actually has a sense of humor, and he hasn’t seen Joey in two years and he says it’s just because time has got away from him, which it has. But of course that’s not the real reason. There, see? Maybe he is honest with himself.

He keeps having dreams about being younger. Stupid things—buying three liters of Sprite at the bodega down the street with the Latina cashier with the pink hair who hated him and falling asleep on Joey’s shoulder in the back of Phoebe’s cab while she went to meet her father and standing on the top of his old building watching Underdog fly over the city on Thanksgiving day. He feels wretched and cliché. He wastes time staring into middle distance. The forbidden, voiceless thought: _could you still be in love with me?_

Three years ago, Joey landed himself a recurring role on the CBS revival of _Hawaii Five-0_ and started running around shirtless and firing guns and chatting up women at beachfront bars every Monday night at 10. Monica doesn’t know he still watches it. He doesn’t know why he bothers to keep it such a secret (he’ll watch it at his desk, with headphones, at 5:00 exactly the day after it airs—maybe it’s just out of habit—his secretary caught him watching once and he _knows_ she thinks she walked in on him watching porn—he used to watch porn at work but now he looks at the bodies and thinks, “are those even people?”), except for the fact he thinks she’d make fun of him. Monica was interested enough when Chandler told her Joey got the role, and she watched him make his big primetime debut, but... it was like with the girls’ room. When they first bought the house they brought Joey out and said “and this’ll be your room” and he’d been so happy about it. But then the twins got older and Joey had never come to visit and Monica wasn’t even thinking about it, but he was thinking about it.

He knew she was right, was the thing. Caring about it made him feel monstrously guilty so why do you fucking care? When you’re standing in the room while your wife talks about painting the walls mint green not even _thinking_ about Joey you’re not supposed to be thinking about bringing it up. It’s stupid. You know how it’s going to go.

Once, while talking to (read: trying to flirt with) Gay Brian in Payroll, now Gay Brian Head of Payroll Who He Kissed Once But Pretends He Didn’t, Brian had just looked at him and asked, “What are you doing? Why are you doing this?” And Chandler hadn’t known what to say, so he’d said, “I don’t know.”

And Brian said, “Is that worth it?”

He thinks that anybody that considers themselves high-and-mighty enough to offer unsolicited advice better be in it for the long haul of daddy issues and mommy issues and self-loathing before presuming to know anything about the way he chooses to live his life.

Usually when he’s in the city pretending to be at an AA meeting, Chandler goes to the Met. He doesn’t know what possessed him to start going; he had no interest in art when he was young. Perhaps that was the reason. (Sometimes, he’d really treat himself and see something at random in the theater district, but he doesn’t think he deserves indulging in that sort of thing so often, and the past three times that he went he cried with rather embarrassing frequency during all the best parts.) He likes standing in front of giant canvases. He’d heard somewhere that you’re supposed to cleanse yourself of the attention issues of the digital age by staring at one piece of artwork for three hours. He hasn’t made 3 hours yet, but he did hit 45 minutes once. Around minute fifteen you start to feel like you’re being swallowed up and that’s what he got addicted to. Brush strokes and color. Time without thought.

That, and there’s a sixteen year old girl who’s there more often than he is who’s taken a liking to him. He hopes to God it isn’t creepy, because he has no _intentions_ of it being creepy, but there are, of course, many situations where men can come off inadvertently creepy against their wills and wishes. And if it were going to happen to anybody, it’d be him. But she’s just a lonely, profound kid with short, curly brown hair with tips dyed bright blue that really reminds him of somebody, but he can’t pinpoint who. She’s the only person he really talks to about his life with. Go figure. A part of it’s because he feels a great deal of empathy for teenagers: he’d never really grown out of that awkward feeling of not being sure how to inhabit a body, so he hadn’t forgotten how terrible it was.

The other reason was because teenagers, for all their faults, cut through the bullshit. He’d been staring at a Rembrandt (Christ Crucified between the Two Thieves) when she’d come up behind him for the first time, snapping gum. “So,” she’d said, “what’s your issue?”

“What’s my ‘ _issue?’”_ He’d pulled a face, balking at her.

“Divorcee? Tortured soul? Midlife crisis? All three at once? Museum people are a rare breed, my friend, and you’ve _always_ got an issue.”

Chandler hadn’t known what to say, turning to look at her. He searched for a way to deflect the question. “I’m a ‘museum people?’”

“Yes, you are.” She had a bit of an annoying twang to her voice. “When you’re here all the time, you start to notice when other people are here _all_ the time.” She then gave him a piercing, almost exasperated look, as if daring him to change the subject again. “So, what is it? Midlife crisis or divorcee?”

Chandler turned back to the Rembrandt, thinking. He focused not on the three crosses but the figures around them, particularly on the short line of horse’s to Christ’s right, the front horse being led along by a faceless man. “My wife thinks I’m at an AA meeting,” he said. He’d never be telling the whole truth, but even that much of it felt... thrilling.

The girl blew a bubble with her gum. “So you’re a _really_ weird one.”

But today he thought he might do something different. Today he thinks he should walk by the old spots.

He can’t go into their old apartments, which is disheartening, because the older he gets the less easy it is to remember everything about them, and sometimes all he wants is to remember _everything_ about them. The colors, the sound of Monica’s fridge when you opened it, the time Joey told him it was less than 100 steps from their door to the coffee shop and counted it out to exactly 97. The millennials don’t realize how good they have it—even after things are gone, scores and scores of it will have been digitally preserved. All Chandler has, on a good day, are some polaroids.

Central Perk has given way to the conquering force of Starbucks, but standing on their old street and looking up at their old building is enough to remember things. He thinks maybe he should grab an Americano. Try and see if Gunther was still working behind the counter. Maybe taunt him a bit with news of Rachel and Ross.

But just as he’s approaching the doors, his insides vanish—Joey at the other end of the block, walking his dog, coming this way.

God, fuck. He should have _realized,_ he should have _thought this through._

Maybe if he ducks into Starbucks and hides in the bathroom, he won’t be seen. But of course, if Gunther _were_ in there, he’d be seen by Gunther, who may alert Joey to his whereabouts sometime in the near enough future for him to figure out what happened. But maybe Joey wants to avoid the awkward conversation as much as he does, and if he just turns around now, averts his eyes, and rounds the corner quickly, they could both just pretend that they—

God, but if Joey saw him, he _wasn’t_ going to pretend to not see him, was he? So basically he has to either hide, right now, and risk being found, because where is there to hide in the middle of a street? Under a car, maybe—or, or! Withstand the humiliation of—too late.

“Chandler!” Oh God, it was happening.

He launches right into the offensive, brain short-circuiting, no idea what to do. “What are you doing here?”

“I take Noli to Central Park every day for her walk.” Joey holds up the leash and gives him a pointed look as though he’s crazy. God, he _is_ crazy. “I always come through here.”

The knowledge that Joey walks past Central Perk every day takes a hold of his stomach and pulls on it. “I thought you were—do you not live in Hawaii?” God, he looks _good._ In some ways Chandler would say he looks _better_ with age, tanned and going a bit grey, a phenomenon Chandler does not understand at all as it has not manifested in himself whatsoever. He feels like he wakes up every day weirder and lumpier and with increasingly discolored skin. Good God, his heart rate’s going up so fast—

“I know you know I don’t live in Hawaii, Chandler.”

“I think I could think that,” he starts saying, trying for playful. “I could plausibly, you know, given the circumstances—”

“Rachel told me she told you.” Joey crosses his arms. “Because I _asked_ her to tell you.”

He would rather just kill himself. “I’m sorry. I know. Sometimes I just get... stupid.”

Joey looks down at the sidewalk and uncrosses his arms in order to scratch under Noli’s chin and behind her ears. Chandler can’t look away from his hands. “You can say that again,” Joe says, half-muttered, eyes still trained on his dog.

Several yards behind him, a small gaggle of friends emerge from Starbucks, not a care in the world, while executive functioning in Chandler’s brain has an absolute fundamental breakdown. Nervous parts of his brain are screaming, _Take a shit in the street, Chandler! Shit in the street!_

Noli’s sitting right on top of one of Joe’s feet, tongue hanging out. Chandler keeps entertaining the idea of going to pet her and backing out of it. He never really was that big a fan of dogs. What if they sense his innate evil and corruption? _God,_ he’s _lumpy,_ he’s old, his right leg is undergoing some kind of nervous spasm and Joey’s this—this—

“You look—” _Sexy._ “Good.” His mouth is all dry.

“Thanks. So do you.”

Chandler raises his eyebrows at him.

“Okay, you look a little weird. But... good weird.”

“There’s a ‘good’ weird?”

“Yeah,” Joey says, straightening back up, looking directly at him. “There can be.”

Chandler clears his throat and looks down at his shoes. He supposes they could go into Starbucks for a coffee. I mean, they’re friends, aren’t they? He couldn’t just—or maybe he could come along on Noli’s walk. But this was Joey’s specialty, wasn’t it always? He shouldn’t have to be the person angling for—

Jesus Christ. What is he _thinking?_ He needs to—

“The real question is what are _you_ doing here?” Noli sees this moment as the perfect opportunity to begin sniffing his crotch. Why do these sorts of things always seem to happen to _him?_ “The only person that still comes here for coffee is Phoebe.” Joey shrugs. “And me.”

Chandler tries to discretely squirm away from Noli, who only responds by growing more determined. “I, uh,” he presses his hands against her muzzle to push her away, “I’m just—here.” Noli mistakes Chandler’s rejection for affection and digs her nose deeper while Chandler tries to hop away without making a fool of himself.

Joey, taking pity, tugs on Noli’s leash to pull her back towards him. Chandler holds his arms out in confusion, a demure parody of outrage. “You couldn’t have done that any sooner?”

“No way,” Joey says. “Are you kidding? That’s one of my best moves.” He grins at Chandler and winks, clapping him on the shoulder. “Come on, let’s go get a coffee. You can come on Noli’s walk with me.”

*

There are some days when Rachel’s taking the train into the city when all she can do is watch the state pass by and think _You know, I think Carol might have got it right._

She loves their Emma. And she loves Ross, in that inevitable sort of way you love people when you’ve known them your whole life. Love is a much more relaxed thing than she once thought it would be. And _wow,_ would it be easier to be spending all of your time with a woman, instead.

Rachel has always been a little bit bisexual, she knew that about herself by now, but she hadn’t ever been able to experiment as much as she wanted to because of her conservative father and conservative everything and how nothing was ever a secret in their friend group for more than two weeks. Well, almost nothing. Rachel bites her tongue while she smiles at herself.

She honestly doesn’t know how she _couldn’t_ love Ross, after all these years. Sure, he was Ross, he was an idiot, but he was _her_ idiot. And at the very least, she had all she’d ever wanted as a little girl, which was a wealthy man who simply worshipped her. She wasn’t going to pretend that her attraction to Mr. Darcy had something to do with literally anything else.

Her complaints about Ross are more simply what her complaints about any man would be, and Ross is often even more considerate than your average man. But he can just be... a bit neurotic. Argumentative. Obsessed with what was “rational.” Reluctant to do chores. Mopey if he didn’t get his way. Sometimes, just... a little bit of an ass. Men are often just a little bit rude in a way that women never are. Women are always the ones apologizing for rudeness. She doesn’t know if it’s sexist to say that or something but it’s true. Someone should put that in a women’s magazine, if the industry weren’t dying. Rachel always thought she’d fit right in in a women’s magazine. She should try her hand at travel writing.

It’s funny, and maybe it’s because of Chandler, but she’s been thinking about these things a lot these days. Not travel writing—the _women_ thing. Not to say that Chandler talked with her about gayness with any frequency (was it _‘gayness?’_ ), the subject hadn’t been broached in years—and only once after he’d got married. But the more time that passed the more she couldn’t stop thinking about it, especially as the world continued to change. It was the Mr. Darcy thing all over again—Elizabeth Bennett _could_ fix her life problems by marrying a rich man that worshipped her, but, that was no longer necessarily her only option. Even, no longer necessarily the _best_ option. Elizabeth would probably thrive in a society where she could wear jeans, Darcy be damned. Rachel always thought she’d kind of had the hots for Charlotte.

It’s these moments when she starts thinking she should never have passed up Paris. She could have been—who knows what she could have been. She likes to imagine that she’d be a bit like Helen Mirren, when she was still on the younger side of old, sipping coffee in a spacious apartment looking over the Seine. Or cappuccino, whatever it was that they drank in Paris. And she’d be wearing an adorable little black turtleneck and gorgeous, calf skin white gloves. Emma could have learned to speak both French _and_ English, a little prodigy. And when she grew to be a teenager she would have had a string of romantic and ambiguously gay European boyfriends and she would have told Rachel all about them. It would have been very _Gilmore Girls,_ if that’s what _Gilmore Girls_ was like. Rachel had never actually got around to watching it.

(But she _should_ have passed up Paris because now she’s a Geller and her family is more important to her than the whole rest of the world, job opportunities be damned—but then again, good God, she’s a _Geller.)_

She supposes in Chandler’s case, Oscar Wilde may be more suitable than an Austen-oriented metaphor. Or... somebody gay, Rachel wasn’t the greatest historian. You can stay in the closet all your life in order to appease society and everyone around you and, like Darcy, Rachel sees the appeal. But you don’t have to. Isn’t that odd? You can just _snap,_ and be anyone at any moment.

As more and more people seem to be doing it, it must be tempting. _But you don’t have to._ Then again, it must be hell.

Chandler came out to her four years into their friendship while he was sitting in her lap.  He’d been dating some woman at the time, actually—maybe The Age of Kathy. He’d found her the perfect bachelor with almost too much accuracy and made a train wreck of the entire thing over the course of the following week. He’d just invited her to... some hockey game, she thinks, and then, out of nowhere, asked, “Have you ever been with a woman?”

“What? Chandler!” She’d slapped him on the thigh. “What is the matter with you?”

“So there is no good time to ask that question?”

She’d given him a once over and hadn’t tried to conceal her smirk. “Why? Have you been wondering?”

“No, I just—yes, but not how you—I think, just, we get each other. Do you feel that?”

They’d been cuddling at that point, Rachel tucked in to the crook of his arm. She hugged one arm around his waist and rested her right hand against his nearest knee. “I have been with women before, you know. Not many, but still.” She’d pat his knee, thinking for a moment. “Please don’t tell Joey.”

“I’ll take the secret to my grave.”

He’d kept kissing her on her forehead. She remembers that she’d been upset all day about her failed date and how much she hated being single and how she was afraid she’ll be alone forever because men are scum and thinking, in that moment, _but I have Chandler._ It was like a warm blanket. _I have these people. I already have people that will always love me. I have magic beans._

Maybe it would have been for the best, if none of them had married each other. Her flying away to Paris forever didn’t fit into the picture either, but there must be some middle ground that would make their lives feel less messy. She has to believe that decay is always a mistake; that some, hard-earned loves are sustainable forever.

“I just think... I might be....” He’d extended his hand at that point, stiff and contorted like he was trying to make shadow puppets, gesturing in the erratic way he did when he was nervous. “But I’ve still never really _been..._ or, been _with_ , been with...” he’d fought against the word and looked away from Rachel when he said is, hand twisting slowly in the air like turning an antique doorknob, “...men.” He’d looked so endearing with his face scrunched up.

“I _knew_ it!” She poked him in the side, making him jump up, squirming away and trying not to laugh. “I knew it I knew it I knew it!”

“You’re the first person I’m telling! I could use a little more empathy here!”

“No way! Chandler, honey, I love you, I really do, and I’m so happy you told me, but I’m also feeling for the first time the feeling Ross felt when he guessed the plot twist in _The Sixth Sense!”_

“Amazing. Upstaged by Shyamalan. What did I expect?”

Rachel walked towards him and rubbed her hand along his back, giving his tummy one last gentle poke before laughing and nuzzling her head into his shoulder. “You wanted your friend Rachel to hold you and hug you and tell you she always knew.”

Chandler mocked offense but didn’t pull away in the slightest. “That is _not_ true!” He dropped his shoulder a bit to give Rachel better access to it. She was so much shorter than him.

(It did turn out, in the end, to be what he had wanted.)

“You’re being really brave,” she’d said, still touching him, the both of them eating ice cream. She’d hung out with him all day until they both left for the Rangers game. “What’s it like to be... dating women?”

“I’m flattered that you consider me somebody that actually _dates.”_ He’d shrugged, stirring his ice cream into soup. “I don’t know. It’s not that bad, honestly. Sometimes I just... like spending time with women better.” He and Rachel had made eye contact and smiled at each other, gentle and crinkly-eyed. “You can talk about things.”

She’d ruffled his hair and he’d let her. He hadn’t told her about Joey, yet, but she suspected.

She just thinks, maybe—before she’d spent nine years of her life being 50% smitten with Ross—finding a Susan could have been the right way to go. Ben was seventeen now, for example. And he was more well-adjusted than any other seventeen year old Rachel had ever met.

The world fucks you up, that’s what it’s come to. After living in the world and getting almost married and having a daughter and sleeping with women and playing sole confidant in all her friends’ drama and working her way up in the fashion industry and passing up Paris and moving from New York to the suburbs, that’s what she got out of it. The world fucks you up.

Actually, her proper conclusion? For _men,_ the world fucks you up. For women, the world fucks you over.

*

“Is Gunther still here?”

“God no,” Joey says, holding the door open for Chandler so his shoulder brushes his chest as he steps past him. “He was arrested for being like, a sex offender.”

“A _se—”_

“Tribbiani! For the last time! Get the animal out of here!”

“She’s a therapy dog, Karen!” He thrusts the leash into Chandler’s hand and pushes him back towards the door. “I need her for _emotional stability!”_

Chandler hesitates in the door, raising his eyebrows in disbelief, holding the leash in his right hand in, frankly, the gayest way possible. “Just wait with her outside, ok? Americano?”

“Ameri—” Chandler realizes ‘Americano’ wasn’t an aggressive nickname. “Yeah, yeah.” Noli walks back out to the sidewalk. “Make sure—make sure that they pour it so that the crema—!” The door shuts behind him.

Karen leans on the counter. “Who the fuck is that?”

“Shut up, okay? A latte and an Americano, and uh, make sure it’s poured with the uh—the Cream.”

Karen raises an eyebrow. “‘The Cream?’”

“He’s an old—he’s an old something, okay?” Joey collapses his elbows on the countertop while the barista inputs his order. “We used to live together—”

Ivy, on the espresso machine, calls down the length of the work counter. “That’s _Chandler?”_

“Ivy!” Ivy comes up to say hello, and Joey takes both her hands in his in welcome. Ivy is a big fan of _Hawaii Five-0._ Karen covers her face with her hands.

“I didn’t think he’d be so—”

“Scruffy? Rumpled?”

Ivy bites her pinky nail. “I want to say ‘lumpy?’”

Karen. “Two votes for lumpy.”

“Come on, you guys!”

“Joy!” That was always how they wrote his name on the cups. “Latte and Americano, for Joy!”

He wishes this were still Central Perk. He is tired of wishing for old things.

“I have a joke,” says Chandler the moment Joey exits, exchanging Noli’s leash for his coffee before Joey is completely out the door.

“Hit me,” says Joey.

“So, I found a lump—”

“You found a _lump?!”_ (Maybe he _was_ lumpy?!)

“Joey—Joey, no. It’s a joke.”

“Don’t joke about that stuff, man!”

“Would you—so, the other day, I found a lump.” The light changes, and they hop into the crosswalk. Joey is already way too worried to laugh at this joke, but he’s going to try to laugh at the joke, because it’s Chandler, and if he doesn’t laugh, he might freak out and get all weird, and what if this is the last time he ever sees him? Joey’s already thought that he might have already seen Chandler for the last time, and—“And I go to get it checked out by the doctor. And the doctor takes one look at it, and, right off the bat, he says, ‘you have 36 days to live.’”

_“Thirty-S—!”_

“Joe! So _I_ say, ‘Gee, Doc, can I get a second opinion?’ And the doctor says, ‘Yeah—you’re ugly, too.’”

Joey doesn’t laugh.

“Joe?”

“Is the twist at the end that the doctor’s a woman? Because that’s like, the oldest—”

“No! No, I said, ‘Gee Doc, can I get a second opinion?’ And the doctor said, ‘you’re ugly, too!’”

“Funnier punchline if the doctor’s a woman.” Cannoli leads them across the crosswalk and into Central Park. She sniffs excitedly along the path, straining against her collar to traverse her favorite routes. “Why’d you tell me that joke, Chan?”

Chandler shrugs. He puts his hands in his pockets. “I don’t know,” he says. “I spent the whole time outside Starbucks thinking about it.”

 _“That’s_ what you were thinking about?”

Chandler looks down.

“You’re something else.” Joey thinks about Chandler, topless, wearing Joey’s Superman print pajama pants. The way they used to always feel like they were up to something. How Joey would lean over him and kiss all the way down his chests, and up his sides, and Chandler would squirm when Joey kissed his sides, because he was ticklish. His hair fell into his eyes, he trembled, he blushed pink.

“You’re right. I have no right to be here. I shouldn’t be here. I just wanted—I don’t know. It felt like something Phoebe might tell me to do to help with the... the, uh...  the nostalgia.”

Joey shakes his head. “If you’d actually asked Phoebe for advice, she’d have told you to call me!”

“But—”

“I know, ‘but!’” Joey strays from the path to head for an unoccupied bench overlooking water peppered with spurting fountains. He sits down. Chandler sits down beside him. He sits close enough for their thighs to press together. “What’s the point, if we’re like this?” he asks. “What happened to us?”

Chandler sighs. “That’s why I told the joke.”

They sit in silence. Noli brings Joey a twisted branch, and he takes her off leash so that they can play fetch with it.

“I don’t think you’re ugly,” says Joey.

Time is what gets to Joey, at the very heart of it. The hairs on his knuckles grow longer and darker and light again, his age a balloon disappearing deeper and deeper into the stratosphere. Watching the death of Blockbuster, the rise of Dunkin Donuts. It’s hard to know what’s happening to him anymore. Billboards with the word “Gratitude” written on them in a groovy 70’s font and Auto Auction garages proclaiming “WE FINANCE EVERYBODY” and the woman he always sees near Trader Joe’s with the blue lipstick and love-worn stuffed animals suspended from telephone wires by their necks. All the unidentified shit Noli likes to eat off the sidewalk. He doesn’t know where he’s going, where he is, what he’s doing. The world doesn’t agree with him anymore. He wonders just exactly how many television shows he’s seen advertised that he’s never watched. The older he gets the more he understands that the arbitrary patterns and routines of life only exist because it’s too terrifying to come up with anything else.

Noli returns again with her stick. Joey offers it to Chandler.

Chandler’s got a wimpy throw. Joey doesn’t tease him for it. Noli trots back, dropping the stick right on top of Joey’s sneakers.

“Dogs hate me,” Chandler says.

“Noli doesn’t hate you.”

“You don’t need to defend her, they hate me! They can sense my yellow-bellied lack of will.”

“Uh, she doesn’t like you because you throw like you’re in Little League. Actually, they throw _better_ in Little League.”

“That’s just an extension of the _fear.”_ He knows he sounds too desperate to come off as funny, but as usual, he can’t seem to stop himself, floundering like a fish out of water. “My entire existence is governed by fear! And dogs smell it! Dogs can _smell_ fear!”

Noli returns. Joey holds out the stick for Chandler again, but Chandler doesn’t take it.

“Chandler,” Joey says, “why do you say all this stuff about yourself?” He chucks the stick away, and Cannoli darts after it.

Sunlight casts gleaming yellow patches of light on Chandler’s face through the leaves, and Joey likes the sight of him. Bedraggled like a musician, almost. The boy who never grew up. Chandler aims his words out over the water. “It’s true, isn’t it?”

“I’m tired, Chandler.” He runs his hand through his hair. “I don’t know what happened, do you?”

“Nope. I wish it didn’t.”

“Yeah.”

“Some best friend I am.”

“Are we still best friends?”

“You’re my best friend,” Chandler says. “I mean, I guess I could say Ross, but Ross is—”

“Weird.”

They both laugh, and Chandler nods. “Yeah, Ross is weird.”

Cannoli comes back, a different stick in her mouth than the one she left with. This one gets more distance, and they both sit and watch her dash for it downhill.

“Did you think our lives were gonna be like this? You know—when we all had five best friends?”

“No.” Noli stops by the water, rolling green grass into her honey gold fur. “You can come with me when I finish my time machine.”

Joey can think of an easier way to solve the problem, but no way he’s suggesting it. “I’d go back and stop Ross from dating Rachel.”

Chandler chuckles. “I’d go back and stop _you_ from dating Rachel!” And his laughter dies, and he sticks his foot in his mouth.

Joey rolls with it, cool-as-ever. “There’s no stopping the ladies once they want a piece of Tribbiani.”

“Never say that again.”

“Or what?” Joey smiles dopily. He missed watching emotions unfurl on Chandler’s face.

“Or I’ll—I’ll take my time machine back to the day before you became my roommate. I’ll re-do my twenties with Phoebe.” Noli returns with the stick. Joey ignores her.

They’re so close on the bench. “You want to know what I’d really do if I met you again? If we re-did that first night?”

Chandler doesn’t answer. He leans so close that his nose bumps against Joey’s temple. His fingers curl into the fabric of Joey’s shirt at his torso.

Noli, impatient to continue playing fetch, grabs Joey’s shoe and starts shaking. The moment breaks. Joey leans down, grabs the stick, hurls it away again.

“When I went to my high school reunion,” Chandler says, “Tony Robbins told me he was shocked I hadn’t killed myself.”

“Who’s Tony Robbins?”

“Just some guy. Shocked _he_ hasn’t killed _himself.”_

Joey twists in his seat. “Are you ok?” He puts his hand on Chandler’s knee.

Chandler wants a cigarette. “I don’t know. Are you?”

“I don’t know.” Joey takes his hand away. “I’ve been thinking that like, I’m pissed they turned Central Perk into Starbucks. When they were first putting it in, I thought they might, like, keep with the carpets and couches, right? But they didn’t.”

“Right,” says Chandler.

“And I don’t like sports as much anymore! It’s all new people!”

Chandler doesn’t answer, because he has never liked sports, but spent his whole life pretending to like them anyway.

“I miss...” He misses when they were together, “the six of us.” When Rachel lost her engagement ring in one of Monica’s lasagnas and they’d all gone to the beach together and found the house filled with sand. When he could still speak to Monica, still look her in the eye. Chandler’s staring at him. He knows he’s started talking and stopped abruptly, but he’s scared of what he’ll say if his mouth runs away from him. “I miss that day Monica made a dozen lasagnas.” He doesn’t know why this puts a lump in his throat. “And our table was broken. So we ate it on our knees.”

Not just their knees. They’d pressed their legs flush against each other to make a table. They’d used plastic forks. He wonders if it’s strange that he misses not having any money, or selfish.

Chandler has lines around his mouth and temples and Joey can’t imagine where they came from. But they remind him of his old smiles, the way they’d crease their way through his whole face, his eyes squinching up in happiness like sunlight.

“I miss that, too.”

He thinks this should feel nice. A mutual longing. But instead it feels sick and tired.

Joey hangs his head. “You wish you didn’t run into me.”

Chandler blinks. “What?”

“You didn’t want to run into me. You’ve pretended you don’t know me anymore for two years.”

“I could never not know you.” He reaches out to take Joey’s face in his hands.

Joey turns away, so Chandler closes his hand around Joe’s upper arm, instead. “Then what are you doing?” Joey jumps to his feet to get away from Chandler’s touch, blood pounding in his ears, insides churning. He’s overflowing, he can’t do this right now, he feels like a woman. “It’s like you forget you’re real! You make choices, Chandler! You promised you wouldn’t and you did! You bought me a _dog!”_

It comes out like a monologue, words he hasn’t meant to rehearse in the shower and on his commute and while he’s toasting bread at 2am and walking Noli in the morning and he can’t keep himself from dwelling on his dreams, tormenting him with visions of a life he doesn’t have. The scent of skin—

“My whole life!” Chandler says, throwing his arms out to his sides, windmill of a person. “My whole life is a mess of you! I need to—I need to—”

He’s a train running at him. The poor thing, Joe thinks.

“—be away from me,” Joey finishes for him. “It’s fine. You want to be away from me.”

“No, I—if you knew—Joe, it’s because—”

“It doesn’t matter why, Chandler. I know why.” Noli trots up to his side.

Joey wishes he brought bread to feed the ducks.

Chandler stands up and puts his hands in his pockets. “I’ll call,” he says.

Joey hooks Noli’s leash back to her collar. “Whatever you say.”

*

Monica can’t _help_ it, that’s the thing. She _wants_ to be tolerant and benevolent and all Mother-fucking-Theresa, if only for her mother’s sake, but the older she gets, the more she hates every person she sees. Young women are too young and stupid and beautiful and older women are obnoxious and terrified and snooty, and seeing women her age might be the worst of all, because while most of the interaction is familiar and easy and relatable, there will be sudden moments when her head surfaces from under the water, gasping, and the voice in her head looks at the smile lines and the strained skin and the fading hair of her boring, boring companion and thinks, _oh, god, is that me?_ _Is this who I am?_

She looks in the mirror and she doesn’t recognize herself. She thinks of that joke Chandler tells at parties. _You’re ugly, too._

She blames the world, she blames growing up. She mostly blames her mother, and all the neuroses she instilled in her while she tried to turn Fat Monica into Rachel Green.

She needs to not be bitter. She needs to be better. She needs to stay up all night, biting her nails and thinking about all the things she needs to be. She needs to stay up all night cleaning the kitchen. She needs to talk to Rachel, but they don’t talk like they once did.

Sometimes he said it with the wrong inflection. _You’re_ ugly. It always put people off. Chandler puts people off.

She worries about everybody, too, and nobody ever gives her any credit for it. Every year on everybody’s birthday she makes her way to Hallmark and she buys a nice card that’s got the crinkly plastic covering over it and she puts a sprig of something from her garden in the envelopes and on the bottom of Phoebe’s and Joey’s and all her cousins she’s lost touch with she writes “We need to catch up soon!” in cursive with a smiley face. She does _everything right,_ god damn it. People that do everything right aren’t supposed to feel like this! Phoebe, who does everything wrong everything wrong at least twice over, _never_ feels like this, she’s certain. So what was wrong with her?

 _I care,_ she tells herself. _Other people don’t. But I do._

“How was your meeting?” She asks Chandler with the girls in bed, just the two of them doing dishes.

“Okay,” he says out of the side of his mouth, tips of his ears going pink, focus directing itself entirely to the pot that he’s scrubbing. “That freak with the dog is back.”

“The angry one?”

“Mhmm.”

He hasn’t been going to AA, either. She hasn’t got any evidence, of course—she tries very hard to resist all of those line-crossing impulses that involve going through his phone or emails or asking his secretary for his day planner or installing a microphone in his car or following him or calling a private investigator to have him followed. That’s crazy. And she must keep herself from crazy. Although she did look up private investigators online just out of curiosity to see how much they cost, but most of the fees of local PIs were by request only and she didn’t want to bug them if they were working on murders and kidnappings and things like that, and she wasn’t going to actually dial the number although she did write one down and promptly burn it with one of Chandler’s fucking cigarette lighters.

With that said, the more time that goes by, the less she cares. So she doesn’t know. There are some things that you just don’t know about people.

(Okay, okay: so she checks out Chandler’s location using Find My iPhone every once in a while, but where’s the harm in that? That’s practically what the app is _for._ And all he ever does is wander around art museums. But why the hell does he lie about going to the art museums? Maybe he’s driving her crazy.)

Maybe she’ll believe him in the morning. Maybe it’s a product of sleeping so close to each other. Maybe it’s how the last thing she sees before sleeping is Chandler in pajamas with a toothbrush between his lips, eyes heavy, mouth foaming blue. She thinks she loves him most in these moments. Pliable and tired. Shell-less and safe in the semi-dark.

They haven’t slept together in a long time. Maybe that meant something was seriously wrong with their relationship but she read a lot of internet advice about how that was normal and ignored all internet advice that said it wasn’t. She confided this to Rachel a few years ago, and she responded by buying a vibrator for her birthday.

“So? Are you going to name her?”

“‘Her?’”

“Well... I guess it doesn’t _have_ to be a girl’s name,” Rachel said, holding the vibrator level with her face. It looked like a little tube of pink lipstick. “She just strikes me as the feminine type.”

Monica rolled her eyes.

“You could name her after me!”

 _“No!_ I am not naming my—the thing!—after you.”

Rachel pouted, then raised her chin, wagging an outstretched finger. “Maybe not! But you’ll never forget that I gave you your first one. I _ushered you into the sisterhood.”_

Monica cringed. “Rachel, I really don’t know if—”

“No take backs, no take backs! You’re gonna _love_ it, Mon, you have no idea what you’re missing. Ooh, Phoebe is going to freak out when I tell her!”

“Under _no_ circumstances will you tell her!”

She’d stashed it in her dresser, beneath her most unflattering stack of period-only underwear. But she couldn’t forget about it. She knew it was there with the same certainty that nagged at her when she knew somebody left a carpet corner turned up downstairs.

In recent months, when the house was empty, she finally got up the courage to try it. And _damn—_ it didn’t matter if Chandler so much as _spoke_ to her ever again.

She’s a little bit obsessed with it, actually. She can’t stop using it and she feels so much more relaxed after she’s come about five times and she’s used it in every room in the house and she always puts on her favorite football jersey and knee socks (because she read on the internet you should be comfortable and that you orgasm harder if your feet aren’t cold) and just seeing the jersery now turns her on a little, but she’s also starting to panic because she thinks that the _absence_ of a vibrator all of her life may have actually caused her, like, real psychological damage—she reads the Wikipedia page on “hysteria” and all the sourced links and watched a movie about it and she thinks, “What if I’m like this because I’m about as sexually in touch with myself as women who couldn’t vote?!” What if she’s _less_ sexually in touch with herself than those women? And is that what she is? Is she hysterical? She gets that it was quite sexist and all that but—but was she?

She asks Chandler in passing—Have you ever heard of Hysteria?

“Like the Hitchcock movie? Hated it.”

“Yeah,” Monica says, and thinks, _Vertigo_ , and hopes that someday he messes it up on a crossword puzzle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nope, I have no idea when more will be written! Welcome to fanfic? Thankfully I don't think anyone's exactly chomping at the bit for the thrilling conclusion to my Friends expanded universe.
> 
> If you're enjoying this, you should check out _Grace and Frankie_ on Netflix! It is the other major project that Marta Kauffman, producer and writer of _Friends,_ has ever been involved in, and the characters are unmistakably Monica, Phoebe, Chandler, and Joey! Just a little gay tv conspiracy content 4 y'all ;)

**Author's Note:**

> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


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